One Days Courtship | Page 5

Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had
received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her
sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton's entire capital
had been something less than her half-yearly income, she might have
made a name for herself; but the rich man gets a foretaste of the
scriptural difficulty awaiting him at the gates of heaven, when he
endeavours to achieve an earthly success, the price of which is hard
labour, and not hard cash.
We are told that pride must have a fall, and there came an episode in
Miss Sommerton's career as an artist which was a rude shock to her
self-complacency. Having purchased a landscape by a celebrated artist
whose work she had long admired, she at last ventured to write to him
and enclose some of her own sketches, with a request for a candid
judgment of them--that is, she said she wanted a candid judgment of
them.
The reply seemed to her so ungentlemanly, and so harsh, that, in her
vexation and anger, she tore the letter to shreds and stamped her pretty
foot with a vehemence which would have shocked those who knew her
only as the dignified and self-possessed Miss Eva Sommerton.
Then she looked at her libelled sketches, and somehow they did not
appear to be quite so faultless as she had supposed them to be.
This inspection was followed by a thoughtful and tearful period of
meditation; and finally, with contriteness, the young woman picked up
from her studio floor the shreds of the letter and pasted them carefully
together on a white sheet of paper, in which form she still preserved the
first honest opinion she had ever received.
In the seclusion of her aesthetic studio Miss Sommerton made a heroic
resolve to work hard. Her life was to be consecrated to art. She would

win reluctant recognition from the masters. Under all this wave of
heroic resolution was an under-current of determination to get even
with the artist who had treated her work so contemptuously.
Few of us quite live up to our best intentions, and Miss Sommerton was
no exception to the rule. She did not work as devotedly as she had
hoped to do, nor did she become a recluse from society. A year after
she sent to the artist some sketches which she had taken in
Quebec--some unknown waterfalls, some wild river scenery--and
received from him a warmer letter of commendation than she had
hoped for. He remembered her former sketches, and now saw a great
improvement. If the waterfall sketches were not exaggerations, he
would like to see the originals. Where were they? The lady was proud
of her discoveries in the almost unknown land of Northern Quebec, and
she wrote a long letter telling all about them, and a polite note of thanks
for the information ended the correspondence.
Miss Sommerton's favourite discovery was that tremendous downward
plunge of the St. Maurice, the Falls of Shawenegan. She had sketched it
from a dozen different standpoints, and raved about it to her friends, if
such a dignified young person as Miss Sommerton could be said to rave
over anything. Some Boston people, on her recommendation, had
visited the falls, but their account of the journey made so much of the
difficulties and discomforts, and so little of the magnificence of the
cataract, that our amateur artist resolved to keep the falls, as it were, to
herself. She made yearly pilgrimages to the St. Maurice, and came to
have a kind of idea of possession which always amused Mr. Mason.
She seemed to resent the fact that others went to look at the falls, and,
worse than all, took picnic baskets there, actually lunching on its sacred
shores, leaving empty champagne bottles and boxes of sardines that
had evidently broken some one's favourite knife in the opening. This
particular summer she had driven out to "The Greys," but finding that a
party was going up in canoes every day that week, she promptly
ordered her driver to take her back to Three Rivers, saying to Mr.
Mason she would return when she could have the falls to herself."
"You remind me of Miss Porter," said the lumber king.

"Miss Porter! Who is she?"
"When Miss Porter visited England and saw Mr. Gladstone, he asked
her if she had ever seen the Niagara Falls. 'Seen them?' she answered.
'Why, I own them!'"
"What did she mean by that? I confess I don't see the point, or perhaps
it isn't a joke."
"Oh yes, it is. You mustn't slight my good stories in that way. She
meant just what she said. I believe the Porter family own, or did own,
Goat Island, and, I suppose, the other bank, and, therefore, the
American Fall.